


press on

by wintercourse



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Meteorstuck, minor violence/blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 07:13:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5734345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintercourse/pseuds/wintercourse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the meteor girls deal with the very messy aftermath of (hate/pity/intrigue/vaguely violent impulses/love) at first sight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	press on

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this as a quick post for tumblr a while ago, so please excuse the pretentious lowercase and weird perspective hopping!
> 
> [original post is here](http://ghostpressure.tumblr.com/post/126658555791/lesbian-meteor-shitfic)

v

you realise, someday, that you’ve lost track of the time. you’re not good at keeping up anymore, not since they all vetoed your dnd schedule. when you knock the drink out of rose’s hands, you think it might be a monday.

r

you poured a drink because you were nervous, nothing more. you go walking with kanaya. you kiss her. you go back to your room, stand in the doorway. she kisses you. past the safety of the threshold, you allow your coy smile to grow larger, genuine. you think, for a moment, of vriska - if you start seething, you play it off. this is not how these things go.

if you find yourself knocking on another girl’s door, well. you play that off too.

v

when you wake up (and it must be a tuesday), your head feels lighter.

k

you wake up glowing, and for once you don’t feel embarrassed. if anything it matches your mood, like your insides are celebrating. a full body blush.

you catch rose sitting in the common area, cross legged and giggling, with terezi at her back and a faux black moustache squished between her nose and upper lip. it matches the tresses littered all over the floor, and you decide you don’t want to ask. your spirits are unnaturally high this morning - you’d prefer not to cut them short.

v

you stare in the mirror longer than you can really justify. it’s a mess, chopped off long long short all the way around your head. she cut in half inch bangs and some kind of mullet, and you wish you could say it didn’t get to you. she braided in tiny plaits, too, a half inch wide each, and you really wish something didn’t stutter in your chest when you counted eight of them.

your phone buzzes on the counter and you open the picture terezi’s sent you. rose standing in half shadow, kanaya’s hand hovering an awkward few inches from her waist, the grainy picture just barely showing her glowing cheeks. it’s candid, and a fucking terrible shot - you’d expect as much from someone trying to lick the screen and press the buttons at the same time - but you still feel like they’re trying to shove it in your face.

the caption reads S4Y CONGR4TS TO TH3 H4PPY COUPL3, and you pull the electric razor from your sylladex.

t

when she breezes into the dining area for breakfast, all careful carelessness, you and rose are the only ones who don’t stare. kanaya looks torn between concern and relief - she’s spent hours wrestling with vriska’s rat nest hair before, and you like to think you offered a public service when you helped dispatch it. rose is grinning viciously into her cereal and you roll your eyes at her lack of subtlety.

in the end, it’s karkat who breaks the silence (something about stale grubloaf with a not-so-sneaky glance at vriska’s newly shaved head, and it makes you happy, so so happy, in a mean way you didn’t expect).

kanaya seems to make up her mind, and compliments vriska with a smile on her “brave new look”. rose is next to her, and she nudges herself closer before nodding in agreement, all faux sweetness and furtive glancing touches to kanaya’s thigh. vriska’s already tight-lipped smile falters for a second, and the part of you that isn’t obscenely delighted feels a twinge of guilt.

vriska doesn’t seem to notice - she slides in next to you, loose limbed and so deliberately casual it’s embarrassing. you give her a noogie for her troubles, and her scowl covers what you think might be relief, comfort in familiarity. rose leans her elbows on the table and tries obnoxiously to make small talk, and you feel a thrill of envy at how easily she’s getting under vriska’s skin.

eventually, rose and kanaya stop playing the happy couple long enough to actually finish their meals, and kanaya is dragged into the corner to suck face for a minute before leaving, blushing, for book club with karkat. it’s disgusting, obviously, but there’s something else flaring up in you at the sight - something bright and weird that you try to smother before it reaches your throat. you pull a face at rose when she strolls back to the table. she leans down and grips your shoulders from behind, throwing vriska an overly sympathetic look.

“well vriska, i know it was meant to be our turn to do the dishes, but you seem a bit out of it today. what with your current…” and here she runs her eyes gleefully up the other girl’s body, smirking wickedly, and you don’t know whether to give her a high five or a punch, “situation. i’m sure terezi would be happy to take over your duties for the day.”

you clench your jaw and smile. “it would be my pleasure.”

r

“so how about it miss sunspot? feeling guilty yet?”

to her credit, she’s caught you off guard. you run your eyes over her, sidelong - you would have thought her too pointed, too wild to display such a softness, inadvertently or otherwise. her bundle-of-bone hands and near black talons are slick with soap and bubbles. you think, very briefly, that you admire the contradictions.

“no, miss fire and brimstone. i’m afraid i’m not.”

k

it starts in earnest later that day, when you turn down the wrong hall - heading to your room after parting ways with karkat. you’re often known to take a detour through the ecto-whatever labs, weaving through vats of hulking carapaces (and at least once, rose swears, a more humanoid corpse - you like to think she dreamed that up, occasional penchant for the macabre not withstanding). you end up at a door, only vaguely familiar, and push through.

you’d like to say it starts then, when you see terezi, pressed against vriska pressed against a wall pressed back into her mottled grey neck. you make a choked noise, and leave quickly.

t

she’s grinning into your skin after kanaya ditches, and you imagine telling her off, telling her to quit the mind games. you imagine running your fingers over her buzzcut and apologising for your part in it. you imagine acting even a tiny bit pale, like you know you’re supposed to.

your nails skitter over her head and you tell her sweetly that she looks absurd, as usual, instead.

k

it’s been a few weeks, and you’ve made yourself welcome in her room.

(she calls them bunkers and refuses to decorate, refuses to make it feel like home. you tack glowing plastic stars on the metal, try to spell out her name until you have none left. you always envy your potential self, the one who could pull real stars just as easily.)

you’ve made yourself welcome, and for her part she didn’t stop you. one night you trace along the shell of her ear, too round and entirely too thin, and you ask her why she still opens her door for you.

“i’m too selfish to let you spend your affection elsewhere. you know how many people would be vying for it.”

you blink at her wry tone - you’re long past the days of human sarcasm and lessons in insincerity, but tonight she has you stumped. you try very hard not to feel thirteen again.

“well,” here something catches in your chest, and you clear your throat, “maybe we can discuss this further when you aren’t doling out antagonism to the first troll to look at you strangely.”

she just sighs (always sighing, the harsher-than-normal higher-than-thou push of air is the backing track to your days now), and rolls her head away from you before noting:

“your furrowed brow is tinged grey, dearest.”

“and the looks you sling are tar black.”

“i can’t say i’m sorry for that,” she closes her eyes, tucks herself into your chest, and you feel the vibrations from her throat, “pity just doesn’t look good on me.”

t

you’ve fallen into patterns. rose and kanaya wake up and eat breakfast and call it morning - you and vriska wake up and say goodnight. rose and kanaya call themselves girlfriends. you and vriska don’t call each other anything, and your stomach flips when they toss around the m word.

you play games of mercy with vriska, and you always win - rose officiates, and her eyes on you when you twist vriska’s arm too far feel like something red hot and entirely inappropriate. you offer her a game, and she declines, lecturing you on human anatomy, limited joint movement and bones that would snap under your kind of pressure.

all you hear is “i don’t bend that way."

k

sometimes you find yourself missing long hair, and sometimes you miss whole yellow eyes, and sometimes you miss purple text, low resolution and infinitely easier to understand.

rose tells you one night, when you lean over her with blood on your lips and green trickling down your arm, that she’s flattered, but. you say the but in unison, and she looks almost proud.

"it’s gorgeous kanaya, really. but my libido’s deader than disco, and your t cells aren’t necromancers.”

v

your hair is growing quickly, and you take up kanaya’s offer to style the finger’s length you’ve gotten back. half an hour before you’re meant to meet her, the pit in your stomach is growing and something is gnawing at your insides. you grab the razor again, and you think you must be a terrible person.

k

vriska is horrid, and does anything she can to spite you. her face is dirty and her teeth are yellow and you think about the hallway with terezi and your skin flickers and your legs slide and you think you’ll set yourself on fire, from the inside, and most of all you miss the sun.

v

“come on lalonde, you’d better try harder if you don’t want the blind chick to beat you!”

you’ve taken her out on the roof for target practise - everyone has to do it, you’ve got them all training, like you’re the only one who still gives a fuck about the impending fight for the fate of the universe.

she grumbles, and sweats, and complains the entire time. you wouldn’t have it any other way.

“unlike you,” and she fires off another miss, the white wand still clumsy in her hands, “i don’t feel personally victimized by other people’s competence. so no, i really don’t mind if terezi can beat me.”

“really? you haven’t hit a bullseye all week and you don’t mind at all?”

she grits her teeth at you.

“really.”

“you know what i think?” you weave through the targets, each slathered in facepaint or blank white primer (motivation is key).

she tosses her head back like she just does not care what you have to say.

you lean into her face, spit the words like venom.

“i think you’re weak. i think you’re convinced you’re the best, i think you cry about the moral highground when someone proves you wrong. i think you’re a selfish bitch trying to collect us like fucking stamps, and i think you keep missing because you’re still hungover from yesterday.”

her eyes are narrowed, smudges of black around the quaking rims, and you push. you press on.

“that’s it, isn’t it! did you wake up and start barfing on your girlfriend? do i need to get you a glass of water? run a warm bath? while we’re at it, let’s alchemize you a nice new sweater to match that pretty little sun-sari, must get chilly cuddling up to ice queen all the time!”

if you’re hysterical now, you aren’t sure you care.

“how’s that going anyway? your little arrangement? still playing the eldritch bride huh, i’m sure you’d love to tell me all about the great rose lalonde’s misadventures in vampirism! you take turns right? she sucks on your neck, and you suck on her-"

she punches you in the fucking face.

r

a year ago, you got too close. you found yourself thinking, later, of the wide curve of her bicep down through to the flick of her wrist. you lay in your industrial bed in your gunmetal bunker and you thought about tensile strength, and uv light, and a nice soliloquy. you went to the alchemy room in the dead of night and decided to stop thinking.

t

"sometimes,” kanaya tells you, viciously stuffing your deflated scalemate, “we have no choice but to press on.”

you can smell the clouds roiling around her bare shoulders, something heady and sweet and you don’t even know what. it’s black and grey and baby pink and red red red all at once, it’s disgustingly cacophonous, it’s probably the ugliest thing you’ve ever smelt in your life, and it’s been clinging to her skin for weeks.

you decide then that you must be in love - if not with her, then with the flashing neon scent-marker that reads like a list of everything she’s ever fucked up. it smells fantastic.

you’re snapped out of your reverie by a vibration in your back pocket, and your grin widens at your first lick of the screen. kanaya quirks an eyebrow at you, and you ask her how’d she like to accompany you on some business.

r

her eye is black and blue, and your mouth is black and hers blue. you propose a trade, and she grins.

k

she drags you up towards the roof, the high edge looking out on the blandest panorama in the universe. you’ve always frowned at it, yearned to fill the space somehow.

you used to fancy yourself poetic, compare the emptiness to her eyes - but now as she pulls on your arm in the darkened passage, they seem to shine, burn. you stumble up the stairwell, and tonight is when you learn that stitching skin isn’t so different to fabric.

t

“what colour is the thread?”

“its in my head, stupid, i can’t see.”

you roll your eyes at her, wishing for a moment you still had pupils.

“wasn’t asking you serket!”

you look pointedly (you hope) in rose’s direction. she throws you a bone.

“rainbow. kanaya made a lovely choice.”

“i’ve been darning your horrid tie dye shirt, terezi, i didn’t have many options.” the words spill around the spool between her teeth, and you lean closer to her deft fingers. you quickly lick vriska’s forehead, blood and all, and she pulls a face at you, unsurprised. rose tsks something about hygiene, and you remind her of the glob of blue blood you saw her spit out when you came up.

you swerve away from her swiping nails, laughing - then you spot kanaya’s smirk and find yourself muttering something about a closer taste.

the tip of your tongue hits the spool in her mouth, and you catch the egg yolk scent of her widened eyes. for a moment you’re unsteady, unsure, and the next you’re smiling against her lips - press on. her breath is freezing cold.

you pull back and tell her she has impeccable taste.

r

once you’ve taken care of vriska (you insist to the others that she deserved it, and they seem inclined to agree), you all trek back down to terezi’s room. the bright colours aren’t doing wonders for your headache, and you suppose she notices - she offers you a stay in her recuperacoon.

you had been looking forward to testing the effects of sopor slime on humans, although you had hoped to convince dave to take that particular bullet - in the name of knowledge, obviously. but you find yourself too tired to argue, and kanaya helps you out of your clothes. you note with a fuzzy sense of satisfaction that terezi doesn’t even offer the pretense of turning away.

you slip waist deep into the slime, and if you don’t feel any better, you certainly don’t feel worse.

r

when you wake up, vriska’s foot is in your face, and her face is in terezi’s chest.

r

when you wake up, your girlfriend’s mouth is smudged with blue.

r

when you wake up, you can’t see straight or think straight and you beg them to haul you out.

k

rose sinks to the floor, too woozy to stand on her feet, and you realize that dunking a thin skinned human into full strength sopor was probably a bad idea. she rolls her head around to face you, and sucks in a breath (it’s deja vu on rewind, and you don’t miss her sighs one bit).

“i’m sorry for collecting.”

you frown at her, ask what she means.

“being selfish.”

you sweep the sticky hair out of her eyes.

“don’t be.”

v

kanaya fusses over your stitches and terezi pinches your arm and rose falls asleep again on shaky doe legs, but not before you tell her you like her best when she lets herself be strong. you plan your next dnd session. you think it might be a monday, and you press on.


End file.
